The impermanence of our generation
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benjymous wrote:
In 50 years time, anyone can understand the significance of a shoebox full of printed photos. Who knows what someone will think when they find a USB hard drive in a box in 2060!
50 years isn't that long... I still have floppies over 20 years old (hard to believe) that still work. And floppies were the least reliable media I've ever used. This stuff is so widespread right now that it will take a long, long time before it is difficult to recover. Now, after our robot slaves rise up and kill us all (only to die out themselves when they realize they don't know how to recharge), and after the few stragglers that survive and rebuild civilization in 10,000 years discover our ancient ruins, yeah, it may take them a while to rebuild a corrupt RAID array.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
David Kentley wrote:
only to die out themselves when they realize they don't know how to recharge
No, they figure out a way (watch "The Matrix").
David Kentley wrote:
after our robot slaves rise up and kill us all
Well, maybe not if they do that.
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Dave Parker wrote:
I don't think old file formats are much of a problem though. You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
You're right, of course, and this is pretty sensible stuff when you look back to the early PC days of 1985. However, I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future rather than just 25, particularly given the continually accelerating rate of new technologies. Will anyone in 2085 even know what DOS was, let alone care about emulating it? Unthinkable though it may be, the same fate might even befall Windows, *nix and Mac OS. And 100 years may a long time for us mortals, but it's a mind boggling eternity from technology's point of view. Imagine archeologists digging up 500 year old relics to try and better understand the life we live today. When most of the people we know today (including a large number of us geeks) couldn't lay their hands on a 5 1/4" floppy drive if their lives depended on it, what do you figure the odds are of those fedora wearing, bullwhip packing adventurers deciphering anything about us that was stored digitally? For all we know, even if they could find an ancient PC (let alone the drivers, etc.), chances are good the world won't be running on the same kind of electricity in 2510 that powers it today. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
Christopher Duncan wrote:
I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future
Assuming they can still read text files, I'd say XML formats are a pretty safe bet. ;P
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future
Assuming they can still read text files, I'd say XML formats are a pretty safe bet. ;P
If you print them out, perhaps. Otherwise, you better hope that they can find a machine that will boot, and the correct OS that can read actually read the file. Without that, they could be Notepad docs and you'd still be screwed. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
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Dave Parker wrote:
I don't think old file formats are much of a problem though. You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
You're right, of course, and this is pretty sensible stuff when you look back to the early PC days of 1985. However, I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future rather than just 25, particularly given the continually accelerating rate of new technologies. Will anyone in 2085 even know what DOS was, let alone care about emulating it? Unthinkable though it may be, the same fate might even befall Windows, *nix and Mac OS. And 100 years may a long time for us mortals, but it's a mind boggling eternity from technology's point of view. Imagine archeologists digging up 500 year old relics to try and better understand the life we live today. When most of the people we know today (including a large number of us geeks) couldn't lay their hands on a 5 1/4" floppy drive if their lives depended on it, what do you figure the odds are of those fedora wearing, bullwhip packing adventurers deciphering anything about us that was stored digitally? For all we know, even if they could find an ancient PC (let alone the drivers, etc.), chances are good the world won't be running on the same kind of electricity in 2510 that powers it today. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes Copywriting Services
Not to mention the cost. I used to develop Mac based software back in the early 90's. I did a project for Rockwell automation back in 96 and I had all of my source files burned to CDs. They were all burned on a Mac. I couldn't open them on my PC and my old 7100 is full of sawdust down in the basement/woodshop! :-O Customer calls me last year 13 years later and is looking for source files. I had already delivers the source with the product so I wasn't obligated to do anything for them, since they wanted to "modify" some stuff "in-house". I couldn't open the CDs and I wasn't about to spend too much time or any money to retrieve the data off of them (and I'm not even mentioning some other source I have stored on Mac formatted Jazz Drive cartridges)!! In the end I bought a program online called MacDisk for $50 and I sent the customer a bill for my time and the software along with the source files they were looking for. Needless to say I never got paid. I guess the point of all of this is that to virtualize an OS to retrieve data can be costly so only very valuable data will be retrieved. If someone finds a hard disk 100 years from now they won't know what is on it and probably won't bother trying to get data off of it. At least a printed book has a cover telling you what the content is! :)
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
Even before the electronic age hit full swing, I knew history wouldn't remember us. History doesn't remember anyone too well. Don't blame future generations; it's fun to look back sometimes, but rather counterproductive on the whole. One of my great-great-grandfathers had a very interesting life, but didn't write a damn thing down. We know what happened only through family stories and the written stories of people he associated with. On the other hand, my grandfather was in WWI and wrote a journal and it's so God awful boring it's unreadable (I'm actually glad his war experience was so boring.) One of the greatest threats you can give your kids is that you'll tell them stories about your life.
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
I know a few very talented photographers who are seriously looking for new careers because no one values or prints photos anymore. Everyone owns a digital camera and the shoot way too many bad photos and post them on the web. Photos have no value any more and neither do photographers. When our great-great-great grandchildren are trying to do their genealogy will they be able to find any photos of us. Will Facebook still exist in three generations and do we want the crap photos on Facebook to be our legacy? :omg:
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David Kentley wrote:
only to die out themselves when they realize they don't know how to recharge
No, they figure out a way (watch "The Matrix").
David Kentley wrote:
after our robot slaves rise up and kill us all
Well, maybe not if they do that.
I realized it won't be recharging that'll do the robots in, it'll be a software bug that causes them all to simultaneously crash because, long ago, a junior programmer forgot that there is INDEED a February 29, 2400.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
On the other hand ... I had a hankering to re-read "And To My Nephew Albert I leave the Island That I Won off Fatty Hagen in a Poker Game" just to find it is out of print. I could pay $200 for a used copy (not even a 1st edition) but I'd rather not. If there was an electronic copy lying around, I suspect I could find it for far less money!
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I know a few very talented photographers who are seriously looking for new careers because no one values or prints photos anymore. Everyone owns a digital camera and the shoot way too many bad photos and post them on the web. Photos have no value any more and neither do photographers. When our great-great-great grandchildren are trying to do their genealogy will they be able to find any photos of us. Will Facebook still exist in three generations and do we want the crap photos on Facebook to be our legacy? :omg:
I don't think it is correct to say photos have no values anymore, otherwise how do you explain sites such as iStockPhoto (for business use) or Flickr (both business and personal use)? The fact is that it is much easier and cheaper to own a digital camera now and taking photos have become a widespread common activity instead of exclusive to photographers just a few decades ago. I'm sure there were people bemoaning the dying art of paintings when cameras were invented and painters were not needed as they used to anymore. However, as you can see painting as an art survives and realistic paintings still live on till today. By the way, there are still plenty of professional photographers taking photos for art, business, magazines, or common events such as weddings.
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." - Thomas Jefferson "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." - Benjamin Franklin Edbert Sydney, Australia
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias[^] Why should we be any different?
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Yup - reminds me of this: Digital Domesday Book lasts 15 years not 1000 [^] They've (in the 7 years since writing that) managed to retrieve the data off the discs, but sooner or later that technology will be lost too, but the paper books will still be readable. [edit] - yes, irony of ironies can be found at http://www.domesday1986.com/[^] - This used to house an online version of the content of the discs, but the site went down and was lost when the original owner died. more info[^]
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
I used to wonder about the future of books even when I was a kid. But as I got older I realized that anything that's really WORTH keeping will be preserved in one form or another. If nobody felt it was important to transfer a COPY of the original Domesday Book to a more modern system while the original hardware system existed, then it only means that it was a waste of time to copy it in the first place. And archiving something on a one-of-a-kind technology is just plain stupid. Unlike the microfiche example later in this thread. There are plenty of microfiche readers still around. The problem is that the value of what's on the fiche isn't, apparently, important enough to warrant preserving it.
QRZ? de WAØTTN
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
A roughly similar situation arose many years ago as baked clay tablets and chiseled stone gave way to less permanent materials. Forgotten languages may be likened to obsolete reading equipment. On the other hand however, global warming may make most of us impermanent as well! :((
73
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
digital is here to stay, if you don't like it address the issues at hand. build a drive that you can pass down generation to generation. use only formats which are not proprietary. someday languages will change (format) and books will become obsolete as well. so who really cares about permanance anyways, evolve.
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Lots more will be lost, because digital data is much easier to loose. My parents have boxes and boxes of photographs of their parents, grandparents, etc. I have a hard drive full of jpgs, which one day will cease to exist when the all the copies of them die. In 50 years time, anyone can understand the significance of a shoebox full of printed photos. Who knows what someone will think when they find a USB hard drive in a box in 2060!
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
While I have been reading lots of ebooks lately, I still would buy paperbacks. I'm more concerned with DRM suddenly not working, weeks or months after purchase. Countless times iTunes has switched the library location on me, and "forgotten" my authorization for my purchased media.:mad:
"The activity of 'debugging', or removing bugs from a program, ends when people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed." - "Datamation", January 15, 1984
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
I wonder how this scenario will look even a mere 100 years in the future
Assuming they can still read text files, I'd say XML formats are a pretty safe bet. ;P
They should be able to read text files just as easily as xml, if not easier. All they need do is use a simple editor, open it and read with their eyes. Reading and xml file is easy to, if you can make make it through the labels, nodes, and attributes. To make it easier, use a program that will give you what you want (which may be easier to construct in the future.) If they have difficulty opening a text file, the xml file will be just as difficult.
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Reading the pixel versus paper thread below got me thinking about how little history will remember us. Many of us know the frustration of trying to access data in an obsolete file format. If you no longer have access to the software that was used to create it, you may well have lost that data forever. The web makes it easier to search the world for someone who has solved the problem, but that doesn't guarantee the solution will be found. In a similar manner, we depend more and more on web sites to store our data. This concept is extended further by the marketing friendly phrase of cloud computing. However, web sites come and go, as do companies which may be the cloud repository of your data. Not that I consider Facebook important, but consider if you were someone who did. Do you really think that by the time your children are grown and you want to share the experiences of your youth with your grandchildren that Facebook, or your Facebook data, will still be around? As an author, this got me thinking about what I write as well. More and more, people are pushing for electronic books and the death of dead trees (if that's not too much of a double negative for you). Leaving aside the pesky issue of ownership (you don't own a digital book like you do a paper one, you just get "rights"), digital books can literally be here today and gone tomorrow. I'm not talking about the fact that Amazon may decide to delete your purchase right off of your Kindle (Think it can't happen? Just ask George Orwell.) but rather am thinking of the future. A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it or the Nazis reappear with their book burning machine. Current trends, however, lead me to wonder if the next book I publish can survive. While this matters less for technology books given the fact that they have built in obsolence, I'm moving out of tech / biz and into a more general audience. Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now. Authors write to the present generation but dream of writing to the ages. I believe much of that dream is at risk in the fragile electronic future we have been creatin
Christopher Duncan wrote:
A paper book is a physical thing. If a publisher does a few print runs & sells them all, then they're out there in the world. If it was worthy or memorable that book may still exist ten generations down the line, passed down from parent to child, donated to a library, bought and sold second hand many times over, etc. It's a real thing, and it doesn't go away unless you trash it
I am rather certain that there are many authors that have in fact been 'trashed' in the past with printed books. Matter of fact not that long ago I read an article about the inability for a small publisher to re-publish an older work, not because a copy didn't exist, but rather because it cost too much to track down the current copyright holder. Thus paper itself doesn't provide longevity.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Even if what I write happens to be worthy enough to be kept around, in a digital world I have little confidence that it will exist decades from now
If it is in fact worthy then it will in fact be kept around. Worthy in this case of course means that the general population finds it so. How many years has Hamlet been available on ebook?
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Yeah I'm always skeptical of cloud stuff as websites can suddenly vanish and you lose everything on them. I don't think old file formats are much of a problem though. You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
Dave Parker wrote:
You've always got virtualization and emulation if you want to run an old OS to run an old program that supports an old format and its usually possible to find a way to convert things. If there's a lot of data then it's probably not too difficult to automate the conversion.
but given the fast pace of change in programs in 50 years, there might not be enough backwards compatibility towards a format that is no longer being used anymore (until after you stumble on the shoebox filled with hard drives.